


let them run

by lunalou



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s03e17 The Ember Island Players, Friendship, Gen, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Toph Beifong and Zuko are Siblings, Toph Being Awesome, Zuko (Avatar) Needs a Hug, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:52:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24704092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunalou/pseuds/lunalou
Summary: Toph laughs, because of course she does.“Scar, huh?” She asks, voice as bright and teasing as it’d been throughout the play, and Zuko hates how his heart drops at the sound of it.“Must be pretty noticeable,” Toph continues, ignorant to the shame and hurt that wells within Zuko’s chest at her words. “But I bet it looks badass!”Which… Wait, what?(a missing scene from The Ember Island Players)
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Zuko
Comments: 48
Kudos: 1790





	let them run

**Author's Note:**

> i rewatched atla and couldn't not write a 'toph finds out about zukos scar fic', especially after watching the ember island players. that one scene during the intermission where zuko is sulking in the hallway alone with toph had sooo much potential and i am a sucker for angst so here we go!!!

“Your Zuko costume is pretty good, but your scars on the wrong side.” the kid tells him – _Zuko_ \- before running off down the hall.

The light mood that had fallen over him and Toph breaks at the boys words. Like a candle being snuffed out, Zuko can feel his good mood sour and he’s shouting at the kids retreating back before he can quite realise it, yanking his hood up over his head and hunching down into his knees with a final snarl.

Toph laughs, because of course she does, and Zuko curls up even tighter, pressing his head firmly into his arms.

“Scar, huh?” She asks, voice as bright and teasing as it’d been throughout the play. Zuko hates how his heart drops at the sound of it.

People say many things about him, both to his face and behind his back, but his scar is a taboo subject for almost everybody. The fire nation knows the shameful reason behind it, and the rest of the world normally knows better than to ask about the massive disfiguring burn that stretches across the left side of his face. 

Worse than the subject of the scar, though, is how disappointed he feels that Toph of all people is laughing about it. Zuko had thought that Toph _liked_ him - which was stupid of him, really, as he knows better then to believe that anybody could - and he doesn’t know what to feel now she’s shown that she's not above talking about the thing Zuko is most ashamed of.

“Must be pretty noticeable,” Toph continues, ignorant to the humiliation and hurt that wells within Zuko’s chest as her words, at the way they cut into him like barbs. “But I bet it looks badass!”

Which… Wait, what?

Zuko peaks up at her, a glare already in place, but then he freezes.

Toph isn’t looking directly at him, her glassy eyes instead staring listlessly over his shoulder, and Zuko doesn’t know if it’s relief or shame that he suddenly finds himself drowning in.

Toph has such a big personality, demanding and loud and witty and so, so clever, and yet, somehow, it hadn't quite clicked until now that she has never been able to see anything with her own two eyes.

That she will _never_ be able to see anything with them.

Which means that, to her and her alone, Zuko is nothing but normal looking. 

It means that Toph doesn’t know about the burn. It means that she can’t see the red distortion of his skin, the constant narrowness of one of his eyes, the burnt shell of his ear. 

It means that Zuko is just another faceless nobody to her, instead of the scarred traitor prince he is to everybody else. 

Thinking back on it, it does explain why she’s never hesitated in seeking him out. She can’t see the horrifying state of him and therefore has no reason to not push his buttons or throw rocks at him as she tries to teach Aang to defend himself and others.

Zuko might be oblivious to some things, but he knows about his face. 

When he was thirteen, freshly banished with a bandage covering half of his face, he became hyper aware of the way people would look at him. Growing up with a scar like his was always going to make him self conscious, and even if he didn't want to be, he has always been aware of the way people would try to avoid looking at him if they could and, if they did have to face him, the way their eyes would linger on the left side of his face.

He’s aware of the whispers that follow him around like a second shadow, the wonder and the curiosity and the horror that make people turn his way. He can feel the weight of others gazes when they think he isn’t looking, their eyes heavy and rooted as they take him in.

Zuko _knows_ what his face looks like now.

He knows how the burn causes unease in people, of how they flinch at the sight of it alone, noses curling in disgusted fascination as they stare, of how their cheeks will flush with shame if they catch him staring back at them.

Zuko understands why people look at him that way, though. He’s disgusted by the sight of his face, too. 

Toph, he realises, has never been able to gaze upon the hideous scar that covers almost the entirety of the left side of his face. Therefore she has no idea just how much her words hurt him, of the anger and the hurt and the revulsion that follows him around at all times because of how he looks.

“Sparky?” Toph asks, voice falling into something more concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t know,” Zuko breathes, which isn’t really an answer at all, but it’s the only thing that’s circling in his head. _She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know_. “Oh, Agni," he doesn't know how to feel, doesn't know what to do. "You don’t _know_.”

“Don’t know what?” Toph stands up straighter, face twisting as she plants her feet more firmly on the floor, seeking out her surroundings. “What’s going on?”

“My scar,” Zuko says, one of his hands rising automatically toward it, his fingers brushing the tightened skin. “You don’t know about my scar.”

It explains so much, really. Toph clicks her fingers at him as if he isn’t ex-royalty, punches him in the arm without hesitation, and demands piggy backs when she doesn’t want to walk anymore. She speaks to him without fear because she can’t see the way his eye is burnt into a permanent glare, can’t see the elephant-seal in the room where everybody is aware of his scar but nobody wants to bring it up despite how much they desperately want to know. She doesn’t know that there is trauma painted into his skin and of how easily identifying it makes him.

Toph has never had the chance to be afraid of what he looks like. 

She likes him for who he is inside - something his uncle always used to try and make him see – and she hasn’t had the chance to be put off by his appearance because she doesn’t know it. 

Agni, Zuko’s head hurts. His _heart_ hurts.

Something in him is growing soft and stupid and shy – _pleased_ – that anybody could like him for him alone – and yet another part of him is tensing and coiling in alarm because with Toph’s ignorance comes the realisation that when she finds out, she will be as uncomfortable as everybody else.

He can feel the distance between them stretch and grow at the thought, the arms width between them lengthening into two, three, six metres. A _lifetime_. There is a swirling mess of who he was and who he is and he realises that, in a way, he never wants Toph to find out about the defining feature that adorns his being and stains his soul.

Zuko isn’t stupid, despite what people think of him. He knows that his face is frightening. His personality is angry and snarling and awkward which alone would be enough to put people off, but his features are frightening on top of that. His face scares people, makes them wonder what he could’ve done to deserve such a scar and whether he’ll do it again.

Toph is only twelve - is just a _kid_ \- and Zuko knows her perception of him will change the second she knows just how much his scar identifies him. 

Zuko also knows, very suddenly, just how much he doesn’t want Toph’s attitude towards him to change. She treats him normally and Zuko has grown used to it, has come to appreciate it, and he really, really doesn’t want that to change.

 _And it doesn’t have to_ , his mind points out to him, dark and taunting.

The distance between him and Toph crumbles, a ravine now separating them, and Zuko feels his heart freeze in his chest.

He is very, very aware of the power he holds now, of the choice he can make, of the irreparable damage any answer can have.

Toph trusts him, despite everything, and that’s what Zuko had wanted when he sought the Avatar out - that’s what he still _wants_ \- but now he realises just how much he can abuse that trust.

 _Scar, huh?_ she had said to him, the answer totally reliant on Zuko and his willingness to be honest.

Toph never has to know about his scar.

She never, ever has to know how bad it really is.

It’s not like people are going to talk about it with her, he knows. People _never_ discuss it in more detail then him possessing it which means that, to Toph, his scar could just be just that: a scar. It could be nothing more than a mark left on his skin, a piece of body tissue where a wound hasn’t healed completely.

It could be barely noticeable to her, if Zuko wanted it to be.

He could tell her anything.

His scar could be a mark on his cheek, a scratch by his lip, something small and forgettable and inconsequential to their relationship. 

Zuko stares at Toph, at her milky eyes and her open face, and knows he could paint any picture he wanted of himself to her, and that she would believe him.

“Know what?” Toph asks again, voice young and curious and _trusting_ , and Zuko takes a measured breath, and then another. “Sparky?”

Zuko can say anything he wants, and Toph will _believe_ him.

He has the power to make this easy, to have her perception of him never change, and a twisted way to erase his own history. To be whole and normal, at least to someone.

“My father,” Zuko’s voice sounds odd to his own ears, sounds as rough and lost as he feels. “Burnt half my face off.” 

In all fairness to Toph, she doesn’t outwardly react bar a slight tilting of her head, a pinching of her lips.

His words catch up to him then like a punch in the chest, ribs splintering inwards and making him gasp for breath.

Agni, is that the first time he’s ever said it aloud? Is that the first time he's admitted what’s happened?

“Wait,” Toph demands, as if his words have just sunk in, a punch to her own chest, and Zuko can’t bring himself to look at her. He’s embarrassed and ashamed to admit that he’s scared to see her expression, to stare at her and witness the disgust that must be painted across her features it as she tries to imagine him: a sixteen year old prince with half of his face destroyed. “He did _what_?”

 _He grabbed my hair,_ Zuko thinks with a twitch, the wall behind him suddenly feeling very far away, _and pulled me up from the floor. He cupped my face with a flaming palm whilst my nation watched from the stands and he taught me respect with suffering as my teacher. He has never been sorry for it._

Zuko hates to remember the Agni Kai and as the years have gone by his nightmares of the event have distorted the memory of it into something almost intangible. Thinking back on it is like looking at a picture drawn in the sand with the sea washing over it: twisted, flawed, and hazy.

It still makes his heart spike, the dreams and the reality twisting into something big and towering and terrible. It causes anger to boil under his skin and fear to tremble within his bones, Zuko’s heart racing and his mind whirling, his body tainted by the residue of fear that has never left him since that fateful day.

Zuko was never going to lie to Toph, he knows, despite how easy it could’ve been. The younger girl has the uncanny sense to know what is true and what is false anyway, and it’s not like there is any other answer beside the truth, beside the past, beside the horrifying facts.

There is and will only ever be this: a scar that runs from the top of his face to the bottom of his cheek - the red and ruined skin that is identifying and obvious to all - and the knowledge that his father was the one to put it there knowingly. Deliberately.

“Hey,” Toph is standing in front of him now, her voice sharp enough to draw Zuko’s reluctant gaze. He expects to see a myriad of things (has grown used to seeing many things - fear, disgust, curiosity) but her face is only concerned. Is concerned for him right here, right now, because, “your heart is going crazy, dude. Calm down.”

Calm down, as if it’s that easy. Did she not hear what he said? Does she not understand what it means?

 _Breathe, Prince Zuko_ , a voice that sounds like his uncle reminds him. _Listen to the oceans waves and calm down. Maybe have some nice jasmine tea, hm? And a game of pai sho?_

Zuko focuses on breathing in and out. He focuses on the floor underneath him and the wall behind him, on the smell of fire flakes and fire-gummies that lingers in the air.

“Sorry,” Zuko says, not sure what he’s apologising for but feeling the need to do it anyway.

“Don’t apologise,” Toph shakes her head, an exasperated note to her voice. “You’d think you were guilty for being born with how much you say sorry, you know.”

 _Am I not?_ Zuko wonders, thinking back on his life.

_(Your sister was born lucky, Zuko. You were lucky to be born)._

Toph doesn’t need to know that.

He’s already told her too much by spilling the secret behind his scar, but the trust she put within him was too gratifying to be anything but be brutally honest with.

“What does it look like?” Toph asks after a moment, innocent in her curiosity. “The scar?”

 _Ugly_ , is on the tip of Zuko’s tongue, but the word doesn’t even begin to describe the horror of it.

 _Ugly_ doesn’t encapsulate the darkness of the skin and the way the burn disfigures his expression into a permanent scowl. It doesn’t justify the size of the burn or the anger behind it. It’s not a good starting point, nor a good ending point, and yet Zuko can’t think of any other way to explain what it looks like.

He had known the moment he woke up on that ship with his uncle beside him and his home far, far behind him, just how bad the burn was.

Toph has no idea, and Zuko has never been able to bring himself to talk about it, let alone describe it.

Toph wants to know, though, and Zuko is committed to giving her an answer.

He hesitates for a second, weighing up the pros and cons, before deciding that Toph being able to see it in her own way is no different to the rest of the world staring with their eyes.

“Here,” Zuko grabs her hand, the appendage feeling impossibly small in his own, and places it upon his face before he can lose the courage to do so.

The nerves in the left half of his face were damaged badly. Zuko refused to visit more than two doctors, and the two his his uncle forced him to meet with told him that what was done was irreversible, the damage deep and true. He knows the fact he can see out of his left eye at all is miraculous, but it doesn’t bring him comfort.

The point is, he can’t feel it when Toph traces her fingers across the withered side of his face, but he can see her reaction through both eyes. 

Toph pauses at first, expression dropping into something carefully blank before growing into something more shocked as she takes it in. She steps closer, lips pinching as she continues her careful exploration – fingers trailing up to his eye and over his brow, following the crooked curve of his ear and the sharp jut of his cheek.

She brings up her other hand unexpectedly and Zuko startles, realising after he’s done it that Toph will have been able to _feel_ the way he flinched back, and feels his face flush.

“Sorry,” They both say at the same time, Toph’s apology urgent yet soft, Zuko’s shameful and genuine. 

“I just,” Toph continues, wiggling the fingers on the hand that’s not on his face, “wanted to feel the other side. To compare.” 

Because, despite being able to feel the left side, she still has no idea what the full picture once was. She has no idea of just how badly the damage has changed his appearance. Of the irreversible way his features have been altered.

“Is that okay?” She asks and Zuko nods, Toph’s fingers still on his bad cheek, not trusting himself to speak. 

Her fingertips are slightly callused, he realises absently, as they land on the right side of his face. They are small and rough around the edges, her skin dry from the weeks spent travelling and nails long and uneven. Her touch is gentle as it traces the right side of his face, though, and he watches as her other arm mirrors the same actions, the same paths.

It is a simple thing, really, the pressure on his face light and barely there, and yet it still feels obtrusively intimate. Zuko doesn’t like people looking at his face, let alone getting close enough to touch it. He doesn’t like the thought of his own face at all, and he can’t imagine what Toph must be thinking. Of what she must be feeling as she compares the sides to one another.

He wonders if the image of him she held in her mind is suddenly as distorted as the scar makes him in real life.

He shudders at the thought, hating himself for allowing this, for telling Toph the truth and letting her feel what the world has always known. Everything in him is screaming _stupid stupid stupid_ because Toph was the only person in the world who judged him for who he was and not for what his father did to him, and yet here he is, allowing her to judge him by his father’s design after all.

Her fingers circle around his eyes, the small pads tracing the mismatched shapes, and Zuko has to bite his tongue and push away the urge to stand up and walk away from Toph - to storm out of the theatre hall, to leave Ember Island, to leave the fire nation completely. To walk and just keep walking and walking and _walking_. He has to remind himself to breathe in and out and, not for the first time, that he can’t always just run away from everything.

This is who he is, and she deserves to know.

When Toph’s hands drop away, his face buzzing and burning in the wake of her touch, Zuko somehow grows tenser.

Letting her see is one thing, but facing her reaction is another. 

Zuko doesn’t know what to expect from Toph, really, but he’s had enough experience from everybody else to know that whatever it is will hurt him.

He knows the mess of his face, the horror of it.

He’s not thirteen anymore, though. Zuko is almost an adult now and he can take on whatever reaction Toph has to give because, even if it hurts, nothing will ever make him feel the same way he did when his father appeared at the Agni Kai and took that first step toward him. 

He can handle this, whatever this is. He can. He _will_.

“I was right.” Toph says, forcing his attention to her. His heart is thundering in his chest and Zuko braces himself for her words, for her expression, hiding himself firmly behind a wall of hate that will mask any hurt he feels. “It _is_ badass.”

Which…

What?

The wall of hate stutters, a flickering of flames that spark and rise before falling, pooling low low low and leaving him open and lost in the face of her reaction.

“It... It is?” Zuko asks, blinking. He reminds himself to breathe in, to breathe out, and then he blinks again, but still doesn’t get it. “ _What_?”

“You’re a tough guy, Sparky.” Toph tells him, her voice going back to the same mature tone she used when talking about his uncle. “Your dad is a _dick_ , by the way, and I hope that Aang crushes him into dust, but you’re pretty badass.” She pauses then, tilting her head and staring at him with unseeing eyes that see him better than most. She smiles at Zuko, face young and teasing and not at all afraid, as she says, “you're pretty _and_ badass.”

Zuko doesn’t blush because being called pretty by a twelve-year-old blind girl isn’t a _compliment_. Except it is. And _he_ is. Blushing, that is. But his eyes are not burning, his shoulders don’t unhunch because of her words, and his heart does _not_ thunder within his chest.

Agni, nobody has called him anything remotely close to pretty since before the Agni Kai. 

His uncle had tried to push him toward girls, had tried to convince Zuko that he was handsome as if he didn’t have a burn covering half of his face, but they both knew it wasn’t true and that Zuko would never pursue anyone.

“My dad _is_ a dick.” Zuko agrees, voice rough and thick, not knowing how to respond to anything else Toph had said. 

A pause then, the sound of the hallway slowly emptying making everything feel more private.

“It wasn’t an accident.” Toph isn’t asking. They both know it wasn’t an accident. 

“A punishment, actually.”

“What for?” she crosses her small arms across her chest and Zuko can’t believe that she doesn’t have a disgusted expression on her face.

“I did something I wasn’t supposed to.” Zuko tries to explain, thinking back to the war council he had snuck into and the way he had stood up for what he thought was right, the way it had backfired on him like a crashing wave.

“And got _that_ as the punishment?” Toph demands, finally disgusted but not at him. “What did you do, Sparky? _Kill_ somebody?”

“The opposite, actually.” Zuko gives an awkward laugh despite the fact it’s not funny at all. Toph looks more confused by his response, eyes narrowing at him, so Zuko forces himself to stop. Forces himself to take a breath and to take in the way Toph isn’t horrified by him. “I, um. There was a meeting. A war council. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, but I was. They - uh.” They were my people. They were my elders. They were my doom. “There was a plan. They wanted to sacrifice an entire division of new recruits.” To kill even more innocents then they were already doing. “I disagreed.” 

“And then what?” Toph asks when Zuko finishes, frowning at him. Zuko blinks at her, not understanding what she means at first, before he realises that she doesn’t think him speaking up alone was enough to warrant the punishment.

And maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe all along his misdirected anger has stemmed from how unfair everything was from the very start - of how his father was just looking for an excuse to banish him, to hurt him. Maybe it wasn’t fair, wasn’t anywhere close to fair, because his father took advantage of Zuko and the situation and twisted everything into something way worse than was warranted. His father twisted Zuko into the bitter, broken teenager he has become, all because Zuko had wanted to help people.

“That was it.” Zuko tells Toph, hating the injustice of it all and how it took him so, _so_ long to realise it, to end up here. “That was all I did.” He continues. He was a year older than Toph is now and Zuko would kill anybody who hurt her the way he was hurt. Would kill anybody who hurt _any_ of friends in such a way. “That’s all I did.” Zuko repeats, mostly to himself, wondering why he spent years defending his father. “That’s all I did, and in the end I didn’t even save their lives. I ruined mine.” his voice is biting and angry and Zuko is so hurt over everything, so pissed off, because, “I never stood a fucking chance.”

He was always going to fail at one point or another, every timeline drawn ending with him speaking against his fathers ways, speaking out against his nations slaughter, but Zuko never thought it’d be over trying to save his own people, the same people who stood and watched as his father stood over him with that flaming palm.

“Hey,” Toph nudges him in the shoulder, still standing opposite him with a weird expression on her face. One that looks soft and fond and proud. “I know it’s not much,” she tells him, “but I think what you did was honourable, Sparky.” 

_Honourable_. That’s all he’s ever wanted to be, really. He had scoured the world for years in search of his Angi forsaken honour – even the Ember Island Players could tell that – and Toph thinks that the one thing that lost him his honour is the one thing that makes him honourable.

Could she be right, he wonders?

Is being here, travelling alongside the Avatar and teaching him how to end his fathers reign, honourable?

His uncle would know, but Zuko can’t ask him.

Toph did say his uncle was proud of him, though. She said that she had spoken to him and that she knew he would be proud of where Zuko is today, of who he has become. For some reason, he believed her words then – desperate and embarrassingly reassured by them - and maybe he can believe her words about this, too.

He looks at Toph’s face, tries to pick apart her expression for any sign of dishonesty, but – just like everybody else in the Avatar’s group – he can only see her genuineness. She’s not lying to him, probably hasn’t even thought about lying to him like he did with her, and Zuko wonders how he went through his entire life until now without people like this in it. 

“...Thanks, Toph.” Zuko hates how much her simple praise makes him ache, of how she’s somehow managed to make him feel like he’s restored more in the past few weeks than he has in the past few years by barely saying anything at all. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Toph smiles, so real and so sincere, and Zuko can’t help but smile back, despite the fact she can’t see it.

“Let’s go find the others, huh Sparky?" Toph asks then, allowing him an escape from all the emotions that have built inside his chest. "I think the plays going to start back up soon.”

"Good idea," Zuko agrees, not really wanting to see any more of the play, but not wanting to be alone either.

Toph reaches out a hand to help him up and Zuko thinks about the man they've cast as her - loud and sarcastic and _strong_ \- and how correct they were without even knowing it. He thinks about how Toph had touched the worst of his face without flinching and without disgust - of how, despite now knowing what he looks like and who he is - she is still choosing to smile at him and offer her hand as if he’s not disgusting.

Although Zuko doesn’t need the help (or the acceptance, or the friendship, or the kindness), he still grabs her wrist and lets her help him up, his heart soft in his chest. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! 
> 
> toph is the sibling zuko deserves and nobody can convince me otherwise
> 
> there is like an extra 1k scene i cut off at the end because it didn't fit well, but i might post it on tumblr if anybody wants a litttleee bit more agnsty comfort. 
> 
> title by little boy in the grass by AURORA and there is no beta 
> 
> [+tumblr](http://lunal0u.tumblr.com).  
> 


End file.
